The One Reason Your Facebook Advertising Isn't Working

The One Reason Your Facebook Advertising Isn't Working

By Jacob Marrero

Over the course of the last year the Matte Black team has focused a ton of resources on telling compelling stories. We aspire to be the best storytellers possible, obsessing over brand voice and spending way too much time on look and feel treatments. However, at the end of the day how well did those stories convert? Did they inspire action? Response? Buy-in?

We believe there is one thing that is the difference between an 0.01x and a 10x ROAS (return on ad spend).

It’s who you’re audience is.

The people you choose to put your efforts in front of will make all the difference in your return. Building an audience is the hardest thing you will do as a brand/entrepreneur/business but it’s also be the most profitable thing you do as well! Creative, copy, and landing pages are all good and will definitely help your conversion, but nothing impacts quiet like audience.

When building an audience we start with three questions. These help us make sure we hit all the boxes in terms of getting in front of the right people.

Question #1: Who is actually buying my product right now?

Your current customers are a perfect base to build from. Facebook has the built in capabilities to automatically build audiences for you based on people who have purchased, web visitors, Facebook fans, and people who have engaged from you. These are invaluable in the audience building process.

Question #2: Who do I want to go after?

A huge reason why Facebook has been so successful at advertising is because it does a wicked good job at getting you in front of new people. Yay! Thank Prez Zuck! A lot of people though tend to go full blown double barrel and take a pray and spray approach to ads when starting out. This is the least effective way to advertise. So think hard about who you want to go after. But don’t get it twisted, Facebook is not magic, if your product sucks it won’t sell. That old hard truth remains intact.

Once you have that group in mind, it will lead you to our next question.

Question #3 Could I make that more specific?

A lot of beautiful budget dollars could be wasted if you don’t appropriately focus your audience. You don’t need to go crazy, but you generally want to have more a full robust understanding of who you want to go after.

18-54, Male, with a salary over $100k is too broad.

Think of 5-10 similarities with your current customers that you could add into this potential customer. Focusing your audience is the easiest way to see success on your paid efforts. Try and hit an audience size that at least made up of 100,000 people. Especially if you have a larger budget.

By no means are these all the questions you should ask yourself when building an audience, but it’s a good place to start the conversation. Lastly, with every audience they have a certain amount of “stamina.” When that “stamina” runs out audience can experience fatigue. This means that you have shown your ad too often to a certain group. You either need to expand the group, change the creative, or consider giving that group a break from your efforts. This is another reason why we think audiences need to be in the 6 figures if possible.

We hope this was helpful in your paid media efforts! If you have any feedback or would like to hear about a certain topic, feel free to shoot us an email at hi@wearematteblack.co.